Speak Now Against the Day

by John Egerton

  Of them all, McGill seemed the most troubled—not so much by the contents of the committee’s report as by its broader implications and its probable long-term consequences. The committee, he wrote, had “tried to cut the cloth to fit many patterns.” The result was “a report with Christian aims … but it can’t be enforced, even with troops. It still has to be accomplished by improving the human heart.” This coercive effort, he said, would only “harden resistance and widen the gulf.” Containing his own anticommunist impulses, McGill scoffed at the reckless charges of communism being thrown at the committee. Lurking behind the harsh resistance, he declared, was a mean-spirited determination on the part of many whites to deny blacks “a chance at being good Americans.” That was simply wrong, he said, and he added, in an apocalyptic closing line, that “some day the Lord’s going to set this world on fire.”

  The Atlanta Constitution editor was still several years away from joining the fight against segregation and discrimination, but he was beginning to see the unavoidable struggle that lay ahead. “I cannot be a good crusader,” he wrote in that portentous fall of 1947, “because I have been cursed all my life with the ability to see both sides of things.” For a long time he had seen and felt the white South’s troubles most acutely; now, with each passing month and year, the black side of the case for simple justice was weighing ever more heavily in his troubled mind. Seeing both sides in the South’s undeclared civil war as 1948 was dawning, Ralph McGill surrendered to the melancholy muse within him and waited in fatalistic resignation for the lines to be drawn and the battle to begin.

  9. Democrats and Dixiecrats

  The summer I turned thirteen, Senator Alben Barkley came to Cadiz on a campaign swing through western Kentucky. A native of Paducah, sixty miles away, he had been our congressman or senator for thirty-six years, and now he was running for the vice presidency on the Democratic ticket with Harry Truman. Barkley was strictly home folks to the proud people of Trigg County, and when he mounted a platform in front of the courthouse on that warm, sunny day, a big crowd was there to welcome him. The applause was lusty, the cheers were loud. I was right there in the middle of all that, caught up in the excitement of the occasion and feeling very grown-up to be a part of it.

  This must have been in late August or early September—somewhere near the midway point between the nominating conventions and the election. Barkley was in his seventies, but he was a smooth and effortless campaigner with a folksy manner, and the rigorous demands of stump politics seemed not to tire him at all. He was totally in command of the podium. His performance (and that’s exactly what it was) displayed his considerable talents as a skillful entertainer—actor, storyteller, humorist, preacher, all appealingly blended in a grandfatherly character wearing a rumpled seersucker suit.

  “Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream!” he pleaded, using a familiar country metaphor to convey his central message. The audience responded knowingly, and with their encouragement, Barkley went on to parade before them a barnyard menagerie: braying Republican donkeys (Thomas Dewey and friends), maverick scrub cattle (Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond), crowing roosters (scrappy Democrats in general), and finally a stubborn, courageous, fighting Missouri mule, Harry S. Truman.

  I knew next to nothing about Republicans, let alone Progressives and Dixiecrats. (My grandfather may have been a closet Republican, but I never heard him talk politics even in private conversation, and there was no party organization in the county for anyone except mainline Democrats.) Truth to tell, I really didn’t know all that much about Truman and Barkley—just that they were underdogs in a free-for-all that had everybody pretty heated up. I saw the Courier-Journal every day (the sports pages, mainly), and that was practically the only source of outside news and information available on a daily basis to anyone in Cadiz, as far as I knew. The Courier’s advice was the same as Barkley’s: Give this Democratic team of thoroughbreds a chance to finish pulling our national wagon to safety. Standing there in the courthouse yard with people who strongly affirmed and supported that point of view—people I knew and liked—left me with no unanswered questions, no doubts, no misgivings. I was wild about Harry. “Give ’em hell, Alben!” I shouted.

  All the rest of that volatile and dramatic political season of 1948 passed right over my head: the rebellion of the “states’ rights” Southerners inside the Democratic Party, their walkout at the nominating convention in Philadelphia and their subsequent rump convention in Birmingham, the equally alarming defection of left-wing Democrats to the Progressive camp, the outcry over Truman’s actions on civil rights and desegregation of the armed forces, and the pulsing currents of emotionalism that subjected almost every public act—and even some private thoughts—to an anticommunist litmus test.

  But what would a rising teenager in a country town of the upper South know about things like that? I could have told you plenty about Citation winning the Triple Crown with Eddie Arcaro in the saddle (Kentuckians were supposed to be conversant on racehorses). I could have given you a blow-by-blow account of Joe Louis’s knockout of Jersey Joe Walcott in the twenty-fifth successful defense of his heavyweight boxing title. And, though I was a St. Louis Cardinals fan, I could have recounted the exploits of Jackie Robinson with a certain grudging admiration, and told you that, for the second year in a row, his Dodgers and not my Cardinals were going to the World Series.

  Even more memorable to me in that eventful summer of ’48 was a big double wedding in the church next door to our house—and on my birthday, of all days. With my brother and me serving as nervously inexperienced but prankish ushers, our sisters married a couple of nice guys from out of town—ex-GIs they had met at college. My brother had a Band-Aid above his left eye. On a dare, he had shaved off his eyebrow, to see if anyone would notice that it was missing. (They did.) I think back on those leafy days of innocent boyhood with the sobering realization that ignorance really is bliss—or can be, as long as it isn’t hurting anyone.

  And yet there were signs of a gradual awakening and subtle heralds of inevitable change even in the little that I knew. For the life of me, I couldn’t square the common white assumption of black inferiority with the lightning and thunder of Louis’s left jab and right hook, or with Robinson’s explosive speed on the base paths. I heard Arcaro called a “wop,” but I also noticed that this grown man, no bigger than I was, had an uncanny knack for riding beautiful horses to fame and fortune, while his critics were trudging behind mule-drawn plows. My new brothers-in-law, a Kentuckian and a Virginian, had served in Europe and the Pacific, where they had experienced their own awakening to a wider world. When the GI Bill opened college doors for them and eventually brought them to Cadiz, I noticed how mature and sophisticated they were. And now they were part of my family.

  Just about everything else I know about 1948 I learned years later. Had I been reading the front page of the Courier-Journal, I might have been curious enough about the feverish hunt for Communists in Hollywood and New York and Washington to wonder what a Communist was, and how I’d know it if one came strolling through the streets of Cadiz. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed that President Truman issued an order requiring white and black soldiers to train and serve and, if necessary, fight together. Maybe the reason that didn’t make an impression on me was that I didn’t hear anyone grousing about it. I knew some avid baseball fans who had quickly grown accustomed to the dazzling play of Robinson and other black stars who followed him to the majors. Could it be that wearing an army uniform would turn out to be about the same as wearing a baseball uniform?

  But those were sideline issues. The main event, the big story of 1948, was politics. Everyone, it seemed, was laying it all on the line—not just the Democrats and the Republicans, but the Progressives, the Dixiecrats, the Socialists, the Communists, you name it. You didn’t have to be a voter or a campaign worker to realize that this was no ordinary contest. For one thing, it was the first time in sixteen years that Franklin D. Rooseve
lt’s name wasn’t on the ballot; when that had happened previously, I hadn’t even been born.

  No one knew it then, of course, but 1948 was to be the last presidential contest in which the candidates traveled primarily by train, and campaigned only on the stump or in the newspapers or on the radio. Four years later they would be flying around in airplanes from city to city, and the television cameras would be there, and the very essence of the political process would be profoundly changed.

  And, in a sense, this was the year when political parties and candidates first began to look away from the past—from depression and war, from the heavy hand of tradition—and to focus on the world of the future. Certainly the South, a past-haunted society throughout its years, was being compelled to consider some new ideas. I didn’t have any inkling of that then, but I see it clearly now: The dominant question in people’s minds, if not on their lips, was how we might become something different and better, rather than how we must remain what we had always been.

  I don’t think it’s an overstatement at all to say that the 1948 campaign was this country’s twentieth-century turning point between the past and the future. Except for Lincoln’s election in 1860 and Franklin Roosevelt’s in 1932, there has never been a more crucial contest than this in the history of U.S. politics. For the South most especially, 1948 was an end and a beginning.

  From the minute he decided in his own mind that he was going to run, Harry Truman had convinced himself that he would win, and to all outward appearances he never lost that assurance, even when all the signs pointed to a certain and crushing defeat. Many a self-deluded politician has calmly and confidently floated over the falls with far more reason to believe in miracles than this President had in the waning days of 1947. But he was a proud man and a fighter, driven by instinct and ego to hate the thought of quitting almost as much as losing—and, as anyone in his position would naturally do, he had to be wondering how he would come out in the history books.

  His closest advisers wanted him to run (they had a lot at stake too). One of them, Clark Clifford, had given him a long memo—called “The Politics of 1948”—that laid out a strategy for snatching victory from his overconfident enemies. A new book by Henry Lee Moon of the NAACP underscored what political operatives like Clifford knew to be true: that in several key industrial states of the North and Midwest, black voters could hold the balance of power in a close election. Proceeding from the premise that Truman had to get those votes in order to win, Clifford urged him to go all out for them—rhetorically speaking. No civil rights bill was going to pass Congress now, he conceded, but a strong proposal would certainly pass muster with the minorities. And what about the Southerners? Clifford said the President could ignore them: “As always, the South can be considered safely Democratic.”

  This was Clifford’s logic: Tom Dewey and the Republicans will talk a little civil rights, but they’re not serious about it, and they won’t go very far. Henry Wallace and the Progressives will try harder, but they’re a fringe element with no chance of winning—and besides, they’re vulnerable on the communism issue. To outbid both of them for the black vote, the things you’ve got to say and do will enrage the Southern Democrats. But you’ve already lost the most rabid racists anyway, and the more reasonable ones won’t surrender tradition and habit and desert the party just to spite you. They’re smart enough to know that if you lose, they lose. Once you’ve locked up the nomination—and it’s almost impossible to deny that to an incumbent—you can go on from there to win.

  Truman was not resistant to this reasoning. He could see himself using the report of his Committee on Civil Rights as a text for preaching the gospel according to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. He had done that for the NAACP at the Lincoln Memorial, and it was very effective. His own record on civil rights was certainly defensible, and he had already praised the committee’s report as “an American charter of human freedom.” He had faithfully carried on FDR’s programs and policies, but now that era was ending; it was time for him, Harry Truman—the President, the Boss—to step forth with his own agenda. And what better chapter and verse could he proclaim than racial equality, an ideal embedded in the nation’s spirit—and one that Roosevelt, for all his liberalism, never quite got around to endorsing?

  Truman’s State of the Union address to Congress—an unapologetic exposition of his traditionally liberal philosophy—got a cool reception from the Republicans and Southern Democrats who predominated in the chamber. Almost as an aside, he told the lawmakers that he would soon be sending them a special message on civil rights. “Our first goal is to secure fully the essential human rights of our citizens,” he stated simply, before moving on to other matters.

  Three weeks later, without prior consultation on Capitol Hill, Truman did as he had promised. In a carefully crafted message, he went beyond the Republicans and the Roosevelt liberals—but not quite as far as his own civil rights committee had gone. He called for full protection of the right to vote, including an end to poll taxes in the seven states that still required them; a severe federal penalty for the crime of lynching; a permanent commission on fair employment, with enforcement powers to stop discrimination; an end to segregation on interstate buses and trains; and a civil rights enforcement division in the Department of Justice and a joint congressional committee on civil rights. The President asked for statehood for Alaska and Hawaii, home rule for the District of Columbia, and compensation for the Japanese-Americans incarcerated during the war “solely because of their racial origin.” And he told his listeners that he had asked the Secretary of Defense to start planning for the imminent end of racial discrimination in the armed forces.

  The President didn’t get into the specifics of his committee’s proposals concerning desegregation in education and in accommodations that served the general public. He also avoided mentioning the committee recommendation that federal funds be withheld from any program or service that did not comply with the nondiscrimination standards. But what he did say was more than enough to draw effusive praise from black leaders (one called it “the greatest freedom document since the Emancipation Proclamation”)—and screams of outrage from the Southern reactionaries.

  Those screams had been loud but brief when the committee released its report back in October. As far-reaching as it was, it nevertheless represented only the thinking of an ad-hoc group of lay citizens. But now, in February of an election year, the President of the United States—who happened to be an unannounced but certain candidate for a full term in that office—was making by far the strongest pitch for racial equality under the law that any chief executive of the Republic had ever made. Almost to a man, the Southerners in Congress took it as a declaration of war.

  Senators and congressmen and governors outdid one another in their vilification and slander of the President. Truman was a vicious and immoral man, they said, a back-stabber, a traitor, a crook, a coward, a Communist. His civil rights program, said Senator Tom Connally of Texas, was “a lynching of the Constitution.” Mississippi Senator James Eastland growled with disgust at a President who would “turn over the government to mongrelized minorities” that were trying to “Harlemize” the nation. Senator Richard Russell of Georgia accused him of planning a Gestapo putsch to eradicate segregation in the South. Governors Thurmond of South Carolina, Wright of Mississippi, and Laney of Arkansas, joined by their colleague William M. Tuck of Virginia, echoed the charges and threats of defiance.

  In the House of Representatives, Mississippi’s chief fire-eater, John Rankin, was rendered momentarily speechless with rage by the Truman program (remarkable for a man who earlier had advocated that African-Americans be deported to Arizona or New Mexico and not allowed to leave without a passport). Then, recovering his voice, he attacked the President for trying to “ram the platform of the Communist Party down the throats of the people of the United States.” Every member of the Mississippi delegation in the House joined in the verbal mugging. “We are not going to stand idl
y by and watch the South be mongrelized,” thundered Congressman John Bell Williams. The repeated references to sex—mongrelization, amalgamation, miscegenation, rape—prompted this angry response from W. E. B. Du Bois: “The rape which your gentlemen have done against helpless black women in defiance of your own laws is written on the foreheads of millions of mulattoes, and written in ineffaceable blood.”

  One after another of Dixie’s congressmen and senators rose to excoriate the President, and not one spoke a conciliatory word. Frank Porter Graham also came in for abuse as a Southern member of the civil rights committee (this just a year before the University of North Carolina president would take a seat in the Senate himself). Finally, after Senator “Pappy” O’Daniel of Texas said Graham had a long record of “connections with Communist fronts,” North Carolina’s Senator Clyde Hoey came to the liberal academician’s defense.

  All through the spring and early summer, in meeting after meeting, white Southerners led by their elected officials rallied around Confederate flags to condemn the President and plot rebellion and secession as their forebears had done. Finally, at a huge conclave in Jackson on May 10, the States’ Rights Party met in formal convocation, with some fifteen hundred delegates from a dozen states. Strom Thurmond told them in a rousing keynote speech that “all the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches, and our places of recreation.” The rebel-yelling Dixiecrats then vowed to walk out of the Democratic Convention in Philadelphia if Truman was nominated, and to reconvene in Birmingham and choose a States’ Rights Party ticket to run in the November election.